Agri-Fab, Inc.
Agri-Fab, Inc. is a manufacturer of lawn and garden attachments located in Sullivan, Illinois. Agri-Fab operates a . manufacturing facility and at peak season employs nearly 400 employees in a town of 4,700 and the surrounding area. At the same time Hydro-Gear, a division of AF Holding, Agri-Fab's parent company, employs nearly 700.
History
In 1936, Community Industries was created with the goal of providing a community with steady employment during the Great Depression. In 1975, when an absentee employer closed the doors of a lawn and garden business in Sullivan, several individuals combined their resources to build a new company.
The Lawn Sweeper
With their idea of developing a new and improved lawn sweeper, the success of the manufacturing business launched in 1975 exceeded the founders’ expectations. The result attracted the attention of a major retailer and, ultimately, made Agri-Fab one of the leaders in the lawn and garden attachment industry.
Expansion
Agri-Fab expanded its manufacturing facilities to meet its customers’ needs, with the addition of a building which was finished in 1987. The expansion proved necessary as overall company sales doubled. Agri-Fab’s business model included the development of a complete product line, ranging from lawn carts, lawn sweepers, aerators, fertilizer sprayers and spreaders to snowblades. But even as Agri-Fab continued to add new products, the lawn sweeper remained its most prominent. After its successful re-entry into the lawn and garden manufacturing arena, Agri-Fab’s growth continued. Through the early 1990s, the business doubled in size from what it was in the late 1980s and doubled in size again by 1999.
In the early 1990s Agri-Fab faced the challenge of drawing enough workers from the surrounding area to keep up with the growth and reverted to automation. The company built a new building and modernized its operations with computer-controlled assembly lines that monitored each unit by weight to determine if any parts were missing. The use of robot technology was implemented in areas such as welding, drilling and strapping to help streamline the process. Agri-Fab also installed sophisticated laser equipment, which eliminated the high cost of precision tooling for lower-volume work.
Products
Agri-Fab currently produces a variety of tractor attachments.
It's line of groomers consists of spike aerators, plug aerators, and dethatchers. Aerators are used to loosen compacted soil and allow nutrients to be better absorbed into the soil. They also help the roots of grass to grow deeper and turf to become thicker. As far as dethatchers goes, Agri-Fab produces a variety including one that attaches to most lawn sweepers. Dethatchers are used to remove thatch, which is a layer of accumulating/slowly decomposing grass clippings, roots, grass stems, and debris that settle on the ground over time.
Agri-Fab's main products, lawn sweepers, use rotating brushes to collect debris such as grass clippings, leaves, pine needles, twigs, and other debris and they are placed into a collection/hopper bag. When the bag fills, it can be emptied onto a compost pile or bagged for disposal. Agri-Fab's produces both tow and push lawn sweepers. Carts have also almost always been a major product of Agri-Fab as it produces both steel and poly carts, some of which are ATV/UTV compatible.
Two other main products made by Agri-Fab are spreaders and rollers. Their spreader line consists of a variety of tow and push spreaders with a large range of capacities and a spreader that is ATV/UTV compatible. The rollers made by Agri-Fab vary in size and capacity and are made of either steel or a poly material.
Other products made by Agri-Fab are ground-engaging attachments (rock rake, disc cultivator, row crop cultivator, scraper box, tow-behind tiller), an ATV/UTV compatible rough-cut mower, 15 and 25 gallon tow-behind sprayers, and a Mow-N-Vac and Chip-N-Vac (both with Briggs & Stratton engines).